Assessing the Wounds of an Ancient Assyrian Ruler

Archaeologists are all abuzz about some enormous, newly reinstalled ninth-century B.C. Assyrian sculptures at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me. They say they can’t wait until it reopens on Oct. 14, after a two-year, $20 million renovation and expansion, to see what curators discovered when they remounted five ancient bas reliefs from a royal compound at Nimrud in northern Iraq.

One in particular has elicited attention. Beautifully carved in gypsum and nearly six feet tall, it depicts in profile a regal figure walking to the viewer’s right. He can be identified as a king because he wears a tall, conical hat, a symbol of power and prestige. He wears a long embroidered cape, an elaborate earring, a necklace and a bracelet with a large rosette, and carries a dagger and whetstone. He raises his right arm in a gesture of acknowledgment or greeting. His left hand holds a bow, the symbol of his patroness, the goddess of war and love.

But something is very wrong here. The king has been disfigured. His bow is broken in the middle. His right wrist and his Achilles tendons have been brutally slashed. His nose and ears are damaged, and one eye has been chipped out. The bottom of his beard has been hacked away.

Amazingly, curators discovered these “injuries” only after the reliefs were moved to the museum’s new wing from the dark rotunda in the old landmark museum building, a magnificent Renaissance-style loggia that McKim Mead and White completed in 1894.

“After the reinstallation, when we could finally see the reliefs in daylight, some 19th-century repairs became very visible, particularly the plaster infill on the panel of the king with the bow,” said Katy Kline, the director of the Bowdoin museum. “Of course all our reliefs have been around for 2,500 years — they were all roughly treated — and we knew there were some repairs, but the damage to the others didn’t seem as deliberate as it did on the one of the king and bow. The more we studied the strategic location of the cuts on it, the more we got interested.”

The defaced king is Ashurnasirpal II, an ambitious ruler of Assyria from 883 to 859 B.C. In 879 he established a new capital for his empire in Kalhu, now called Nimrud, about 20 miles southeast of Mosul. He built a vast walled city, with a citadel, temples, royal palaces and residences for thousands of people he forcibly settled there. All of the reliefs at Bowdoin are from the northwest palace there, except the one with the disfigured king.

“It probably comes from a temple in the citadel,” said Barbara N. Porter, an independent scholar and research associate at the Harvard Semitic Museum. Ms. Porter, an authority on ancient Assyrian art, has written widely on Bowdoin’s reliefs.

This year, when curators identified the plaster restorations to the king, “we had to decide if we would leave the repairs or explore the apparent damaged parts to see if there was more to learn,” said James A. Higginbotham, associate curator for ancient art at the museum. They removed the plaster additions.

They now conclude it was the Medes tribes from the east (currently Iran) who disfigured the relief when they conquered Kalhu in 612 B.C.

“The Medes were former vassals of the Assyrians, and while they may have had some help taking Kalhu, the circumstantial evidence for the mutilation points to them,” Mr. Higginbotham said. “What’s clear is that the people who occupied the palace purposefully went about defacing certain reliefs. They were very selective.

“They saw the images of the king as embodying the power itself.” Ms. Porter added: “It’s retaliation against the visual image of an Assyrian kingship, even though Ashurnasirpal II had been dead since the 800s, and Kalhu was no longer the center of the political empire. It could be seen as a magical attack as well as a symbolic disfiguration.”

Bowdoin’s other reliefs depict the king as warrior, priest and protector of Assyria. Each has a cuneiform text in Akkadian listing his many victories and accomplishments. Often the king is accompanied by protective deities — bird-headed supernatural guardians and winged human figures — and stylized representations of the tree of life.

At one time dozens of these larger-than-life figures on stone reliefs lined the king’s throne room. Originally painted in bright colors, they were meant to intimidate visitors. In the past 150 years they have also fascinated archaeologists.

The excavation of ancient Kalhu began in the 1840s, when Austen Henry Layard, a 28-year-old British diplomat stationed in Baghdad, became convinced that a series of earth mounds along the Tigris River might be an ancient capital. He secretly hired Arab tribesmen to dig in the mounds and immediately found an ancient palace compound, complete with murals, ivories and wall carvings.

Assuming, wrongly, that it was the ancient Biblical city of Nineveh, he excavated several wall reliefs and sent them, via camel, river raft and ship, to the British Museum for safekeeping. Then he returned to England, where he was knighted for his discoveries.

“It’s possible the locals were not happy Layard was there,” Mr. Higginbotham said. “His tools were taken and he kidnapped a man to get them back. There was suspicion of foreigners.”

After Layard’s departure, archaeologists flocked to Kalhu and its extraordinary reliefs were scattered across the globe (to museums in Mumbai, Baghdad, London and New York). American missionaries in the Middle East were particularly anxious to claim them, because they thought they proved the veracity of the Bible. (Genesis 10:8-12, for example, discusses the “great city” of Calah — same as Kalhu — and how the “mighty hunter” Nimrod established the dynasty of the Assyrians.) Among those missionaries was Dr. Henri Byron Haskell, who sent five panels to his alma mater, Bowdoin, in the 1850s.

“It was the beginning of an awareness of the wider world of the Bible, a revolution really, because it confirmed the idea that the Bible was historically accurate,” Ms. Porter said. “These carvings were suddenly a blinding light on a world that up to then was essentially lost.”